Both my parents retained an extensive selection of verse from the national Parnassus in their heads, even if they chose not to go around reciting it to their daughters, except on long car journeys when we ran out of songs to sing. My father had a preference for Sergei Esenin, and frequently recited an unbearably sad poem about a bitch whose puppies were thrown into a river to drown, which he knew in both Serbian and Russian. Sobaka – the Russian word for a dog – still sounds incredibly sad to me because of that poem. My mother’s range was extensive, but she was fonder of reciting prose, and particularly the final lines of Père Goriot by Balzac, where an elderly man – whose two daughters had married into the aristocracy and abandoned him – is buried at the expense of a poor student. After a while, we were all able to reel off the inscription on old Goriot’s gravestone without prompting. I am not sure if my mother’s fondness for that particular scene came from an unconscious desire to see her daughters marry aristocrats and abandon her, or from her regret that she had left her own parental home in eastern Serbia to marry my father, or – and this was most likely – from her pure love of pathos. Mother was the only person I knew who actually listened to the words of pop songs on the radio and cried: particularly when the songs were about leaving home, lost loves, nostalgia and regrets in general. This used to annoy my father, a rational soul, no end. At times, we had a moratorium on music with words in our house, until I found my mother crying to the sounds of Saint-Saëns’s Swan. Then we realized it was pointless and let her be.
My Montenegrin grandmother used to recite one or two classics of children’s poetry and a vast selection of epic ballads, with a strong preference for blood and gore in both. Beheadings, impalings, the pulling out of hearts and livers: that was the substance of Granny’s poetry. I still remember a Turkish hero, Musa, slain by the Christian Prince Marko, who was so brave it turned out he had two hearts and a double ribcage. Granny’s other favourite was poetry about women’s suffering, but she was no suffragette. In one verse, a mother of a small baby is immured in the foundations of a fortress, her breasts still heavy with milk, which ran like white tears from the stone. In another, an elderly mother nurses the hand of her youngest son, dropped from the sky by a raven flying from a distant battlefield. My favourite Granny poem was the one about a woman who was wrongly accused of being unfaithful. To punish her, her husband ties her to the tails of four horses and dismembers her. When he realizes that she was innocent, he repents and builds a monastery at each of the places where a part of her body first fell. The couple are reunited in heaven: a Montenegrin take on Lady Chatterley, I guess.
In the four years between my move to London and her death, Granny wrote to me only once. It was a short letter, pencilled in a deliberate hand clearly unused to writing. She reminded me to visit my parents regularly and urged me to behave in a way which would not dishonour my lineage: no laughing in public places, no loud conversation, modesty in dress and in everything else. Granny wrote as though she was worried that, away from my father and my tribe, I might be in danger of succumbing to some ungodly excess. In her world, Montenegrins who lived apart from their tribes were notoriously prone to prodigal or licentious behaviour. Her prompting came not because she lacked confidence in me, but because she clearly believed that this was what a letter from a grandmother to her granddaughter should be like. It wasn’t the place for frivolities of any kind. Although written in continuous lines, her letter was – from the first word to the last – a string of rhythmic pentameters, the verse of Serbian epic poetry.
Much later, I realized that poetry writing had, in fact, something in common with lactation. Prompted by some mental/hormonal/ godly arrangement, the poetry comes as if from nowhere and, if not written down, engorges a swollen chest to the point of unbearable pain. Eventually, the urgency begins to ease and the writing takes place just intermittently. It is at this point only that it can be abandoned. Then it dries up completely. The organs which create verse – the heart, the brain, the fingers, the stomach – retain a memory of how it was once done, but are no longer able to produce poetry. In fact, like lactation, poetry is something that my adopted culture – let’s call it British – is not entirely sure about. While poetry writing is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s certainly better done in the privacy of one’s own home.
Au contraire, the Yugoslavia of my adolescence was still stuck in that nineteenth-century frame of mind from which emerged Byron, Shelley and Tennyson, the bards, the lechers and the poets laureate, great men to be adored and admired, rather than shy nursing mothers. In terms of poetic role models, I was slightly better off than a British child of my age would have been. There were poets everywhere and they were celebrated. Communists wrote poetry, and so did workers and peasants, and it was par for the course as far as members of the honest intelligentsia were concerned. Many of our greatest national figures were poets. They were commemorated in macho monuments, wielding swords and sitting on horses, streets were named after them: what’s there to be shy about?
The Yugoslav poets of that era could be divided into two broad groups: the state-sponsored bunch and the outcasts. The first lot wore suits (and, if male, ties) and held responsible jobs in the media, publishing and arts administration. Their books tended to appear with ‘big’ publishers in leather- and cloth-bound volumes with gold-embossed lettering, and got adulatory reviews. The outcasts wore rarely washed bohemian clothes, had badly cut hair and were frequently in dire need of a good dentist. They tended to read more broadly and had the obvious advantage of no nine-to-five (or, as it was locally, seven-to-three) jobs to insert a modicum of discipline into their days. They were published by small presses, if at all, in slim volumes of thirty to forty poems at most. These volumes were frequently illustrated by the author (naturally, the suits had no time for such frivolities). They were hardly ever reviewed. In fact, a review was generally a bad thing, a sign that someone was out to get you, normally under the orders of a hostile suit somewhere higher up. These reviews themselves required a finely honed set of interpreting skills if one was to divine whether the author was on the way to jail or not. Some of the outcast bohemians had excellent connections among Belgrade’s pickpockets from shared stints in local prisons. If you had a drink with a boho in a local pub you never knew who was going to come up to say hello.
There was some element of crossover between the two groups – a member of the boho tribe would temporarily sober up and get a haircut and a good job with a publisher for a few months or years. Given abundant state subsidy, these jobs required no financial savoir-faire, and the absence of managerial qualities was not a problem. The nicely heated new offices would normally become a kind of drop-in centre for a particular coterie of bohos, whose books were suddenly all over the publishing lists for the coming year, and the whisky purchased for the meetings with sales-rep teams was drunk in no time. Things never lasted, however, for any boho worth his salt would usually make a boo-boo of a political kind, normally by publishing a book of verse which could be interpreted differently. This resulted in the pulping of volumes and so-called ‘informative’ conversations with poetry-loving cops down at the central police station.
The suits also occasionally missed a trick, which was all too easy to do, particularly with allegorical poetry, and would join the bohos for a few months or years in driverless wilderness. You could always tell a former suit in a group of bohos: their skin was too healthy, they got drunk too easily and they had regular, stable families consisting of one wife and one or two children. Even if quite a few bohos depended financially on wives with full-time employment, their marriages were usually shorter than one-book publishing deals. Both groups were equally lecherous and both groups were largely male. The suits were more used to getting women on a silver plate and the bohos to singing for their supper, but there was no difference in their basic assumption that writing poetry required more sex and seduction than tram driving.
Although there were very few women poets in those days, there was no sh
ortage of female verse groupies who didn’t write poetry themselves. They tended to come from the ranks of the literary proletariat: they were librarians, proofreaders, literature students and suchlike, temporarily bent on becoming famous as muses. Women poets as such were not unknown and, indeed, I can confirm that they were encouraged; but the overall atmosphere, not unlike a boozy men’s club, was not too favourable for a writing female.
Those women who gained recognition through loss-leading literary magazines tended themselves to divide into bohos and suits, but the number of the latter was so tiny as to be practically non-existent. Most women poets kept ordinary day jobs, and had to wrestle with the sexual advances of men poets until such time as they were ready to become sexless mother figures revered as national monuments. In order to keep their jobs, even if of a bohemian persuasion, they allowed themselves only minor signs of eccentricity (a tilted hat, a floor-skimming skirt, a chain-smoking habit), and – unlike their male colleagues – never waited for decay to develop to the point where they had to have their front teeth extracted.
All in all, I was too fond of creature comforts (good-looking, tall and well-dressed young men included) ever seriously to consider a poetic career. However, I was not to know that when the verse started pouring out. The schools I attended needed and encouraged young poets – for inclusion in school magazines and yearbooks, participation in school poetry festivals, and all manner of other festive events. There were too many birthdays of famous people, anniversaries of battles and revolutions, name-days and openings of institutions. All needed a celebratory line or two, preferably in rhyme.
One of the nicest things about being a poet in socialist Yugoslavia was the idea that poetry mattered. State subsidy enabled poetry magazines to flourish and each two-horse town had a poetry festival all of its own. You could take part in those without having to pay five pounds for the first submission and two-fifty for each subsequent one, as you do in Britain, and I frequently did. By the time I was twenty-three, I had built a reputation as a moderately known poet, with a string of publications, one or two poetry prizes and regular high-profile readings on television poetry programmes. (I am not sure if even BBC4 would dare to schedule these in Britain.) I also developed admirable skills for rejecting excited poetic suitors with stories of boyfriends of long standing, although in a short while I began to feel distinctly bored after any stretch of time in the more mundane world of civvy street, where men generally tried to control their passions. I was aiming to publish a collection of my poems, which was more difficult, but not entirely beyond reach. Thank God I never succeeded in that particular effort.
There was an annual competition for the publication of a first book by a young poet which normally attracted quite a lot of media attention. It had to, for journalists were under orders to cultivate young poets at the juncture where they could still be encouraged to turn into fully blown suits. My manuscript was short-listed and then rejected and I went to see the poetry editor, whose sad duty it was to have to explain rejection to all of us near-misses without discouraging us en masse. The poetry editor himself was a well-known provincial, neo-surrealist poet, and the main organizer of a number of quite outrageous ‘happenings’ around town, with a ridiculous name (as though his parents sensed the neo-surrealist angle even at birth). ‘It’s a fine collection, Vesna, mature well beyond your young years,’ he said, welcoming me into a tiny, smoke-filled office on the first floor of an apartment block in a side street just off the main drag.
The young poet
My poetry could hardly have failed to register as ‘mature well beyond my young years’ when it was full to bursting with the most recherché inter-textual allusions while at the same time brimming with references to the wilder kind of carnal experience, which was, I hardly need to say, derived largely from book reading (that early encounter with DHL had to leave an imprint somewhere, I guess). ‘Fine collection, indeed, but lacking any sense of irony. You take yourself too seriously, my dear,’ he continued, hitting the nail on the head. (All my poetic idols, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to Milan Rakic, took themselves very seriously indeed: grand, erudite and full of self-love was what I aimed to be.) ‘How about a drink now, my dear child?’ the editor punch-lined. I had to meet my ‘boyfriend’ immediately.
The themes of my poetry could be broadly divided into two subcategories: one, melancholy, self-indulgent love poetry; the other, Brechtian, rebellious, satirical and political. (The latter was likely to get me into trouble eventually, if I didn’t watch it.) My earliest successful poems – successful in the sense of getting into print – were social-observational. However, I continued to write love poetry even when I was most certainly not in love with anyone. One of the earliest poems, entitled ‘I Cried Like a Red Poppy in a Field of Wheat’ and written when I was barely six, reveals all the characteristics of the genre which I was to polish and perfect through many years of wrestling with my melancholy, self-indulgent teenage muse.
I was particularly fond of penning what I now call a Penelope poem. In it, the female poetic subject is longing for an absent male, who is – normally because of some force majeure – obliged to go on travelling for years, leaving the said (sad) subject condemned to waiting, which she does, doggedly and faithfully, knitting, weaving, picking flowers, whatever. While the male subject is most often a known lover, he is sometimes as yet unmet (Penelope promises to recognize him when he finally decides to turn up). He is often just an ordinary male person with some special qualities, but he can equally have pseudo-religious powers: Jesus-like, omnipresent and all-knowing, and good beyond comprehension.
In many of these poems, the female who waits (the waitress) assumed a sexual authority, experience and world-weariness which the author arguably did not possess. Imagine sonnets written by Lady Caroline Lamb and you wouldn’t be far off: while Byron is off in Missolonghi, what’s the girl to do but write poetry? Throughout my late teens I used to show manuscripts to boyfriends, who tended to be unbothered by the fact that the poems were obviously not about them, and sometimes got rather too excited by the promise of adventure the verse contained.
By the time I hit my early twenties, I decided, in Marxist parlance, to wed theory and practice more closely, and began to affect the appearance of an incipient bohemian. I smoked filterless little cigarettes, allegedly favoured by Joseph Vissarionovich, which went very well with tiny glasses of grappa as strong as absinthe, a black duffel coat, a short crop (I was almost as breathless as Jean Seberg) and an affaire du coeur with Andrei, a white-haired literary scholar some thirty years older than me, who was not very interested in my poetry but immensely concerned to ensure that I didn’t keep a diary.
He was so fond of lecturing that he couldn’t really stop himself, and I loved that. Over the three years which followed, I learned more from him than from the entire university department at which I was studying. In the midst of it all, I suddenly stopped writing poetry, which pleased him no end, for, although he lived for the poetry of the past, he always seemed to find living poets slightly embarrassing, perhaps because he believed that the noblest emotions are the ones we repress. Soon afterwards I started two-timing him with a boy of my age and left, but continued to check out his books as they appeared, every year just before the book fair, hoping that one would be dedicated to me. The urge to be inspirational was, for a long while, much greater than the urge to be inspired, which is, perhaps, a woman thing. The strangest aspect of it all is that, in spite of spending literally hours and hours together, and most of them quite alone, we kissed only once. The man remains an enigma.
My greatest measurable achievement as a poet turned out to be taking part in the celebration of Comrade Tito’s ninety-second birthday, or what would have been his ninety-second birthday had he not chosen to die just before his eighty-eighth. (During the lull before the storm of steel which shook my homeland in the nineties, ‘official’ Yugoslavia practised a strange form of necrophilia towards its erstwhile president for life.) In my house
hold, the preparations had been debated for days. The discussion did not focus so much on the advisability of taking part, or the choice of poem – that would have been too rational; rather, we argued incessantly about what exactly I was going to wear. One had to think about the fact that the event was taking place before a live audience of 30,000 which gathered annually at a football stadium for the big day, people for whom I would represent no more than a distant blob of colour, and a further couple of million or so half-hearted TV viewers who were still watching the show out of a habit acquired in the long afternoon of Yugoslav socialism. For them, my poem would be – like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon at Lady Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles – most probably a suitable window for a ‘tea or pee’ break. (No advertising was allowed to spoil the event.)
The exact outfit was the subject of heated arguments between myself, my mother, an assortment of relations and anyone else who cared to contribute. There was never a shortage of opinion, free of charge, in my neighbourhood. I was not really sure. One day I was certain it would be a pair of jeans with a white T-shirt and a pair of Converse All-Star trainers. (Blue or red starke, as they were called in Serbo-Croat, were the uniform footwear of my lycée clan.) My mother prepared to commit suicide. Next day I dreamed of a little black dress and Audrey Hepburn hair. Mother and the director of the show protested that black was highly inappropriate and suggested red. ‘Your colour,’ said my mother. ‘Our colour,’ said the director. ‘Peasant,’ mumbled my sister. She used the feminine form of the noun. There was no doubt that she had me in mind. Only peasants wrote poetry anyway. (The word peasant, with its full power of character assassination, is not really translatable into English. It was neither here nor there as far as the real peasantry were concerned, but a poisoned dart if directed at a Belgrade student of letters.) Red, black or white, it made no difference. Writing poetry was not cool. Not unless sung, accompanied by no more than a single instrument, and even then only in alternative clubs with audiences in double digits. I couldn’t count on my sibling’s advice.
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